I bought this album on cassette in the summer of 1990, the summer before my junior year of high school. It was a bit of an impulse buy because I wasn’t planning on buying it when I went to Sound Warehouse that day. It wasn't even on my radar. But a newly released video from the record was playing on the store monitors and the song caught my attention. The video had George Harrison and Tom Petty in it and I figured anyone who works with those guys must be pretty good. I hadn’t even yet connected Jeff Lynne to ELO.
So I bought the tape. It is a great album, not a filler track on the whole record. This should have been a bigger seller, but it's tough for 50 year old rock stars to break through on the teen oriented pop charts, even in the early 90's. I would listen to this tape on my panasonic knock-off walkman as I sat in the back seat of the car as my parents drove us in the back Kansas state highways as we moved away from my beloved home of Overland Park and out into the country.
Eventually my cassettes would be neglected as I moved on to CDs and then eventually to iTunes and then to streaming. I kind of forgot about this record. I didn't hear it for almost thirty years. Then I accidentally stumbled upon it on Apple Music the other night. Listening to it took me immediately back to 1990. Amazing the power of music. I could see the Kansas wheat fields passing by from my car window in the dark, the only illumination coming from the little red LED light on my portable cassette player as my parents drove us around because everything in south-central Kansas is far away.
It holds up, this record. Great stuff.
